At the outset, it needs to be said that “Intelligent Dance Music” is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.

For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is “intelligence” as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it’s possible to listen to and write about “stupid” forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to “smart” sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the “meat” and becoming pure spirit.

And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM’s half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott’s “Goosebumps,” tracks like “Real Friends” on The Life of Pablo, even moments on “The Young Pope” soundtrack.

You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the ’90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp’s first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of “electronic listening music,” along with that same year’s Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.

Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.

The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the “oomph” required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin’ or slammin’. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ’s set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of “eclectronica” clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.

You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy ‘n’ mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM’s history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM’s chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and “Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass.” Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.

Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre’s discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there’s Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you’d have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn’t really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca’s smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I’m constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.

The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash

2004

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It’s unusual to find glam-rock in the genealogy of an IDM album but, with The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash, breakcore artist and disco DJ Jason Forrest exuberantly weaves together samples from the likes of Elton John and Starship. It’s sort of a loving tribute but, while the odd bombastic drum solo or Beatles sample is left whole enough to be recognizable, these snippets of sonic excess combine into something singular and otherworldly. The sounds themselves are familiar, but they’re arranged in wild forms, the compositions often twisting in directions that are disconcertingly abstract.

Tracks like “180 Mar Ton,” with its frenetic chopped-up guitars and shout-along interludes, summon an infectious kind of hyperactivity, which can just as quickly give way to the noisy disintegration of “Big Outrageous Sound Club” or the blown-out psychedelia of “An Event (helicopter_passing—(edit)—251001.mp3).” Elegant it’s not, but Unrelenting makes for an energizing listen. –Thea Ballard

Down With the Scene

2000

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Whether it was his young energy (he was 21 when Down With the Scene was released), his San Diego upbringing, or, more likely, all of that combined with his own omnivorous curiosity, Kid606 helped upend IDM’s stereotype of bloodless astringency. Everything from noise-rock blasts to hip-hop’s world-conquering bravado to jungle’s hyperspeed breakbeats fed into his chaotic, fragmentary, and compelling collages—works of experimentalism utterly unafraid to laugh at themselves and the world.

Down With the Scene is a kaleidoscopic effort and a half. There’s smooth swagger on “GQ on the EQ” and gentle sweetness with “For When Yr Just Happy To Be Alive” slamming up against frenetic compositions like “Punkshit” and “Two Fingers in the Air Anarchy Style.” As for the scene in question, titling the second song “Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass” and throwing in samples from CB4, among other sources, creates its own perverse salute. –Ned Raggett

Haus de Snaus

2001

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Blectum from Blechdom’s impulsive, glitchy electronic music is simultaneously challenging and unpretentious—fun, even. Kristin Erickson and Bevin Kelley, aka Kevin Blechdom and Bevin Blectum, met at Mills College in the late 1990s, and Haus de Snaus collects two of the women’s first releases, 1999’s Snauses and Mallards and 2000’s De Snaunted Haus. It charts an evolving—or maybe unraveling—sound built from a healthy dose of unhinged theatrics and fairly rudimentary software. (In an interview with Tara Rodgers in the book Pink Noises, Kelley recalls using a free, early version of ProTools that limited the number of times you could “undo.”)

The album’s first half is more reserved, establishing a tinny, raw sonic aesthetic and loose improvisational leanings on tracks like “Shithole” and “Cosmic Carwash.” It’s on the Snaunted Haus section, however, that Blectum from Blechdom’s personality comes to the fore in a series of spoken-word skits shot through with impenetrable mythology (with the snauses and mallards as recurring characters). Campy horror-film narratives punctuate the squelching electronics in what feels like gleeful defiance of experimental music’s self-seriousness. “What use is music that revolves only around having ‘chops’ and being ‘good’? Why feel obliged to wrap your body around some anachronistic sound vehicle?” Kelley asks Rodgers in Pink Noises. There’s something both libidinal and liberating in Blectum from Blechdom’s approach. –Thea Ballard

One on One

2000

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When Chantal Francesca Passamonte’s full-length debut landed, she was 30 years old. That’s creaky by dance standards, yet youthful for institutional art music—in other words, the juncture suited her perfectly. By then, the U.K.-based Passamonte, who was born in South Africa, had already been releasing tracks for almost half a decade under the name Mira Calix, but it wasn’t until One on One that she committed to IDM’s native format: a proper album, the listener’s domain and wallflower’s autonomous zone.

Calix was an employee of Warp, and so she knew IDM’s hallmarks well. But on One on One, shepushes at those tropes. There’s metric play aplenty—like the scattered, anxiously looping “Skin With Me”—but the rhythms of “Routine (the Dancing Bear)” are decidedly un-digital, coming from a children’s metal toy. In the boys’ club of IDM, Calix made her female presence clear on “Ithanga,” mining her voice for tonal resources. Here, you can also peer into her future ambitious sound art, thanks to the infusion of classical instrumentation amid “Sparrow”’s textural irritants. –Marc Weidenbaum

Rest

2000

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There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term “microhouse” was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.

As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with ’80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through “Beau Mot Plage” like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller’s sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.

“Text,” the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It’s an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that’s deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller’s 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée’s true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever. –Simon Reynolds

Maßstab 1:5

1997

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It’s difficult to name an area of electronic music that Wolfgang Voigt hasn't touched, either via his many production aliases or his hugely influential labels, Profan and Kompakt. His M:I:5 project ran through the mid-’90s, concurrent with his more famous work as Studio 1 and before he began his seminal ambient work as GAS. Maßstab 1:5 collects some earlier EPs and augments them, landing on the edges of the IDM scene largely due to a squiggle factor and textural vagueness not commonly associated with Voigt.

This being Voigt, Maßstab 1:5 still makes many other records on this list sound like New Orleans jazz, so committed it is to small tonal shifts and pinprick percussion. Grainy samples are mangled into new and shifty forms, such that even a sound as short as a snare hit seems to morph three times before it passes. Voigt also subverts techno paradigms by keeping much of his percussion slyly off-grid. This material was a formative text for the minimal techno movement on the horizon, and one wonders if the record’s title—translated “Scale 1:5”—wasn't already prophesying dance music's shrinkage.–Andrew Gaerig

Tides

2001

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Germany’s Uwe Zahn made a handful of IDM-leaning records as Arovane, but none were as satisfying or as perfectly formed as this 2000 album. Because of its gently ebbing synths and hip-hop undertones, detractors might argue that Tides owes an obvious debt to Boards of Canada’sMusic Has the Right to Children—but Zahn’s innovations are significant enough that they don’t quite resemble anything else.

Much of this stems from Zahn’s frequent use of the harpsichord, which gives the music an uncommon, baroque stateliness. Elsewhere, Christian Kleine’s bright and uncomplicated guitar lines move things further away from the early Warp axis of influence by evoking the languid post-rock of Chicago’s Thrill Jockey. Combined with Zahn’s knack for plaintive, keening melodies and Tides’ succinct run time, that inventiveness makes for a low-key gem that’s still as functional and as evocative today as it ever was. –Mark Pytlik

Soup

1998

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Manchester’s Darrell Fitton has all his IDM bona fides: a track on Warp’s Artificial Intelligence Vol. 2 comp, an assistance credit on Autechre’s debut album, a hand in Gescom’s shadowy productions. But even without that history, his 1998 debut album as Bola puts him in the upper echelons of ’90s electronic music.

Soup hovers somewhere between his mates Autechre’s clanging, mechanized rhythms and the warm reveries conjured by Boards of Canada—which is only fitting, as Bola shared a label with those Scottish brothers. Still there’s something about Fitton’s handiwork here that strikes a different set of nerves: He never pretends to be post-human like the former, and he never sets about conjuring that lost sense of childhood innocence like the latter. Instead, Soup stakes out its own sonic space, at once poignant, bracing, and cinematic. –Andy Beta

Spanners

1994

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The Black Dog emerged in early 1990s, during the heyday of Aphex Twin, µ-Ziq, and the like: a world ruled by grinning electronic pranksters, jokesters, and clowns. Spanners, the trio’s third album, is their cheekiest entry into the lexicon of dance music, and proposes a scenario for its listeners: What if you entered a club and it was just a never-ending hall of funhouse mirrors?

Throughout Spanners, sounds are in flux, stretching into strange and hilarious shapes without warning or reason. The 10-minute epic “Psil-cosyin” feels like dozens of micro-songs combined as whistling synths morph abruptly, like Flubber flying through through the air haphazardly. Yet amongst all their jokes, the group (which is comprised of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner) also offers a studied survey of global vernaculars, retrofitting Latin rhythms, Middle Eastern scales, jungle, hip-hop beats, and more into their Rube Goldberg machine. Spanners was the last time they worked in this configuration, and their final brainstorm still teems with rollicking energy. –Kevin Lozano

Islets in Pink Polypropylene

1994

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Before IDM became a nation of Aphex and Autechre cosplayers, the genre was less defined by aesthetics than by a shared ideology. Here was a loosely connected axis of post-rave kids, united by little more than a shared willingness to subvert the tools of their techno idols and create sounds that hadn't previously been imagined.

No record of the era better embodies this find-a-machine-and-freak-it ethos than Islets in Pink Polypropylene, the otherworldly debut by British producer Anthony Manning. Built entirely on a Roland R-8, a chunky digital drum machine then celebrated for its realism, Islets is a meticulously crafted, multitracked flurry of kicks and hi-hats pitch-shifted into unrecognizable bubbles and squelches. For Manning, it was as if rhythm and melody had never been distinct elements to begin with, and his fusion of the two set an early precedent for the digital signal processing abuse that would come to define IDM at the turn of the century. –Andrew Nosnitsky